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Moonfruit.com Review

Moonfruit has been around for awhile. Launched during ‘the dot-com bubble’, back in 2000 as a Flash-based website builder, it quickly became one of the most popular places to create a website. Similar to Wix, it later switched to HTML5 technology. As expected, the switch was very successful.

To edit an object on the canvas, just right-click it and use the floating editor that lets you change things like fonts, colors, style, size and other options relevant to the item selected. If you have lots of text boxes, you can align them using the rulers and guides tool. Moonfruit keeps things really simple. However, it is still more complicated than Wix or Weebly.

Similar to Adobe Muse and Simbla, Moonfruit lets users create the Page Master – a background layer that appears on every page of your site. It can be used to place objects that you want to appear on every page, e.g. company logo, contact button, or phone number.

2. Feature Set and Flexibility

I would divide all Moonfruit features into the following groups: Standard, Blog, Shop and Mobile.

Standard. With Moonfruit you can add many standard features to your pages including image galleries, forms, slideshows, various widgets as well as custom code snippets. These are all nicely organized in the toolbar. Just select a widget, drag it to the page and drop on the canvas where it fits in.

The custom code feature allows you to add literally any kind of functionality to your site. Thus, you can easily add a Mailchimp sign up form, a SoundCloud track, a poll, a quiz, a calendar or any other web service that lets you generate and paste custom code for your account.

Moonfruit provides a library of free images and icons to select from.

Blog. Moonfruit has a decent blogging platform. It produces nicely formatted blog posts, features a commenting system with various moderation options and also lets you schedule your articles.

You can set individual page permissions to allow or restrict access to certain user groups or individual users for your blog, as well as other content on your site.

Shop. Moonfruit has its own eCommerce platform. Of course, it can’t compete with such powerhouses like Shopify or Volusion, yet it still offers enough tools to set up and run an effective webstore. What I like most about their eCommerce is its integration with Facebook and Twitter: you can share your product via social media right from your admin panel .

Other eCommerce features include low stock notifications, shipping settings, product options and status. Also, you can create different types of promo codes: percentage codes, fixed amount (you can set an exact monetary discount amount, for example $5), and free shipping.

Mobile. Moonfruit has a built-in Mobile Editor that lets you arrange the order of elements, change colors and also hide and unhide elements on the page. Though this is a bit limited set of options, you can still play around with the elements and colors.

If you don’t want to use the optimized view that is provided automatically, you can use your desktop view. In this case your mobile visitors will see the normal, non-optimized version of your website. You can also set up mobile redirect right from your control panel (visitors using mobile devices will be redirected to the provided address).

With Moonfruit you can also add a phone link to your site. What are phone links? Glad you asked. These links are also called Click-to-Call. Such links (buttons) allow mobile visitors to just press the button to make a call.

3. Designs

Number of Templates:

63

Free Templates:

✔ YES

Visual Editor:

✔ YES

Responsive Design:

✘ NO

CSS Code Editing:

✘ NO

Moonfruit themes look modern and fresh. If your first choice of template isn’t right, and modifying it isn’t enough, you may simply start again with a new template. However, you can’t switch templates once you have created your site. The upside is that Moonfruit offers an array of customization options so that you can bring your new ideas to life even with your current theme.

I couldn’t find any advanced editing options (HTML/CSS editor) in the control panel, so I can assume that Moonfruit belongs to the group of site builders that don’t open up the codes to their users.

4. Customer Support

If you get stuck, you can click the Help menu which is located directly in your control panel. You can choose between searching their extensive FAQs or submitting a query. I’ve just checked out their Video collection, it seems they have video tutorials on all their features.

5. Pricing Policy

Pricing Option

Cost

Features

Lite:

$9/mo

✓ 1 Website;✓ 5 Pages; ✓ 500 Mb Storage.

Standard:

$12/mo

✓ 1 Website;✓ Unlimited Pages; ✓ 1 Gb Storage.

Plus:

$20/mo

✓ 10 Websites;✓ Unlimited Pages; ✓ 5 Gb Storage.

Max:

$35/mo

✓ 20 Website;✓ Unlimited Pages; ✓ 10 Gb Storage.

Your free Moonfruit-branded site won’t cost you anything, but you must update your site at least every six months. Otherwise, you site will be considered abandoned and thus deleted. Ad-free plans include Lite ($6/mo), Standard ($12/mo), Plus ($20/mo), and Max ($35/mo). These are disсounted to $4.5, $9, $26.25/month if you pay annually.

It’s important to note that Moonfruit lets you create multiple ad-free websites using the same account. Specifically, you can publish 5 websites using the $9-$12 plan, 10 websites with the $15-$20 plan, and 20 websites with the $26.25-$35/mo subscription.

What’s more, Standard, Plus and Max plans come with one or more free domain names, including free five email mailboxes. Similar to Weebly, Wix and other site builders, Moonfruit partners with Google to provide you $100 AdWords coupons (if you spend $25).

Conclusion

Moonfruit is rather simple. It looks like a solid web service that cares about its customers. As I see it, the builder is primarily intended for creating simple portfolios, business websites and shops, so if that’s the case, just sign up and see for yourself how it looks and operates. Remember to come back and share your experience in the comments!.